Conjunction of the Moon and Mercury

Dominic Ford, Editor
From the Conjunctions feed


The Moon and Mercury will share the same right ascension, with the Moon passing 8°11' to the south of Mercury. The Moon will be 28 days old.

From South El Monte however, the pair will not be readily observable since they will be very close to the Sun, at a separation of only 13° from it.

The Moon will be at mag -8.7, and Mercury at mag 2.6, both in the constellation Aquarius.

A graph of the angular separation between the Moon and Mercury around the time of closest approach is available here.

The positions of the two objects at the moment of conjunction will be as follows:

Object Right Ascension Declination Constellation Magnitude Angular Size
The Moon 22h34m20s 14°22'S Aquarius -8.7 33'21"9
Mercury 22h34m20s 6°11'S Aquarius 2.6 10"5

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 17° from the Sun, which is in Aquarius at this time of year.

The sky on 29 Mar 2026

The sky on 29 March 2026
Sunrise
06:41
Sunset
19:10
Twilight ends
20:34
Twilight begins
05:16


Waxing Gibbous

95%

11 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 05:36 11:17 16:57
Venus 07:38 14:09 20:41
Moon 16:10 22:50 05:20
Mars 06:01 11:52 17:42
Jupiter 12:19 19:28 02:38
Saturn 06:41 12:44 18:47
All times shown in PDT.

Warning

Never attempt to point a pair of binoculars or a telescope at an object close to the Sun. Doing so may result in immediate and permanent blindness.

Source

The circumstances of this event were computed using the DE430 planetary ephemeris published by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL).

This event was automatically generated by searching the ephemeris for planetary alignments which are of interest to amateur astronomers, and the text above was generated based on an estimate of your location.

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10 Jun 2059  –  Mercury at highest altitude in evening sky

Image credit

The Moon in conjunction with Venus and Jupiter, with the Very Large Telescope in the foreground. Image © Y. Beletsky, ESO, 2009.

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